Christine Dawood lost her husband and son on a notorious diving expedition to the Titanic wreck. She tells our Writer at Large how events in Scotland pieced her life back together
You may not immediately recognise Christine Dawood, but you’ve probably said a prayer for her, or told friends and family how deeply you felt for her.
Three years ago this summer, Christine and her family were at the forefront of everyone’s mind. The entire planet was rooting for them. Billions of human beings hoped for their safety.
Christine was the chance survivor of the Titan sub disaster. She was meant to travel down to the Titanic wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean onboard the submarine.
She and her husband, the Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, along with the owner of the Titan sub Stockton Rush, the Titanic expert
Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and the British explorer Hamish Harding were all set for departure on June 18, 2023.
Then fate intervened. Christine’s 19-year-old son Suleman asked if he could take her place on the dive.
The family is wealthy. They paid $500,000 for two seats, and were guaranteed the sub was safe. So, being a mum who just wanted her son to have fun and an experience to remember, she agreed to Suleman’s request.
An hour-and-a-half into the dive, all communication with Titan was lost. The search-and-rescue mission lasted four days, only ending when it became clear all hope was gone.
Those 96 hours at sea were unimaginable torment for Christine. Eventually, debris from Titan was found. The sub had imploded. Everyone onboard was lost.
In a recent damning report, Canada’s transportation and safety board said numerous failures in Titan’s design, and the broader company culture of the US firm OceanGate, which owned the sub, were central factors in the disaster.
The agonising search for Titan became a global story.
Therapy
HOW does someone recover from such an experience? After all, Christine gave up her seat on an expedition which led to the death of her husband and son at a site that’s already the grave of 1,500 people. The weight of her suffering must be profound.
I met with Christine this week to talk about her book, 96 Hours, and learn how she coped with such grief and loss. It’s strange to meet a woman who you don’t know, yet who has been in your mind. I don’t believe in god, and so I didn’t pray for Christine or her family. But I remember vividly wishing good thoughts for Christine, her husband and son, and hoping – along with the rest of my family – they would be found safe.
My family talked about their plight. I recall the sense of horror we felt when news emerged of the deaths.
Christine is a psychologist. As we begin talking, I ask if her training helped her. A little, she says, but nobody can carry out therapy on themselves. She’s had to seek a lot of help from counsellors and doctors over the years.
“Finding meaning” after such horror was the biggest struggle. “It makes you question your identity,” Christine says. “Who you are, and what you are. It’s like you fall into a hole.”
No parent should live to see their child die, she says. Experiencing that horror undid her. Indeed, Christine even asked herself if it was possible to go on living after what happened. “The big question for me was: ‘Do I even want to have a life after?’.”
But Christine came to realise that she did want to live. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” she adds matter-of-factly. Then came another big question: “What does life look like afterwards?”
How could life make any sense after such a tragedy? Christine is still searching for meaning. “I’m not quite in the ‘complete afterwards’ yet,” she explains.
What Christine has been very careful to avoid is obsession. I’ve covered many tragedies as a journalist – mass loss of life in disasters or terror attacks. Many of the families of those who lost their lives understandably spend every waking hour on a quest for justice. Indeed, they devote the rest of their lives to legal battles and investigations.
Christine says she cannot do that. She doesn’t want to “get lost” in her grief. She wants to maintain a “healthy connection” to what happened. “If you cross a certain threshold it becomes unhealthy, right?”
Tears
REMARKABLY, given all she’s been through, Christine remains a funny, charismatic woman. However, there are moments when pain is etched on her face, and times when she seems tortured by memory. Right now, I can see self-doubt on her face as she considers how she’s handling what she calls “life after”.
“How can I do it?” she asks herself. “Finding a purpose sounds so easy, right? Like you just change your identity and accept this new identity. Like you just wake up one day and say ‘now I’m gonna do that’. But it’s not that easy. It’s a process.”
But life is improving. “I’m finding my feet,” she says. Some days Christine no longer wakes up with the first thought in her mind: “Oh God, they’re gone.”
Her family has helped her a lot. She has a daughter, who she’s extremely protective of – she doesn’t want her surviving child, who is now a young adult, to have to live with the Titan disaster defining her identity as well.
Christine is from Bavaria and met her husband at university in Germany. His family is one of the richest in Pakistan and owns a conglomerate which deals in everything from fertiliser to dairy and energy.
She was able to access a lot of professional support after the disaster, which, together with the love of her family and friends, helped her get through the last few years.
“I received so much support and love that I feel I need to pay it forward now. I almost feel guilty,” she adds. “I’ve got this voice now. I feel like if I don’t speak about grief and loss then who will? That’s what is driving me now.”
So she’s decided to build a therapy centre in southern England, where she lives. It will be a charity offering counselling for people who have lost loved ones and are struggling with grief.
“I feel it’s a calling,” Christine says. The therapy centre should open by the end of next year. This is now her purpose. “It gets me out of bed in the morning.”
There were times, she explains, when she just wanted to stay in bed all day every day, and would have if it hadn’t been for her dog desperate to go out for a walk. The therapy centre will be residential, like the clinic Christine went to in Germany for two months after the Titan disaster.
“As a psychologist, I have maybe a few more tools in my toolbox, but you can’t analyse yourself. You need someone to hold the mirror up. When that happens you’re like ‘no, that’s not me’, but then back in the dark of your room you’re like, ‘hmm maybe that is me’.”
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Grief
CHRISTINE adds: “It may be unpopular to say, but grief is a choice. I choose every day to be grateful and to look at the good things in life, not what I’ve lost.”
She says she has managed to “integrate” her husband and son’s memory into her life in a way, she hopes, that is healthy. “I didn’t remove pictures of them, but I also didn’t make a shrine. I tried to leave it normal. I allow myself ‘non-sad moments’, if that makes sense. I choose not to point fingers. I choose my own mental health.”
Nature is her free therapy. She spends a huge amount of time walking or in her garden. Her conversation is littered with comments about ladybirds and squirrels, plum trees and raspberry plants.
The media, however, and social media, has left an indelible mark on her. Media intrusion was appalling. She was stalked by photographers with long-lens cameras and tabloid journalists – even outside her home.
“Why?” she asks. “It was such an intrusion. This is my house. I’m not a public person. I didn’t choose this. I didn’t go into politics or certain professions where you choose to be in the public eye. I’m a private person. I was thrown into this.”
She adds: “If they’d died in a car accident, the outcome would have been the same – they’d have been lost. But my grief would have been private, not plastered everywhere.”
Social media, though, “was even more brutal”. She was inundated with comments like “they deserved to die”. Christine tried to avoid reading this kind of sadistic abuse but at times she couldn’t help but look. “You read those comments, and it’s just a downhill slope from there.”
Other comments, she says, “were telling everybody how bad a person I was for letting them go. If I’d have known what was going to happen do you really think I’d have let them go?”
She had to hire a media crisis management team to deal with the barrage of attention. “I didn’t even know that type of company existed,” she says.
Cruelty
IT’S astonishing to think anyone could send messages that cruel to a grieving mother and wife. She simply gave up her seat on the sub to her 19-year-old son because he wanted an adventure and wanted to be with his dad, who was, Christine says, “his best pal. He loved being with his dad”.
What does she think motivates such cruelty by these anonymous faceless trolls – though the word “troll” is far too mild for the suffering they inflict on innocent people.
“That’s the big question,” she says. “I have to say the majority of people who never met me supported me. The amount of prayers we received was astonishing. So many people sent messages saying ‘we’re praying for you’. So the huge majority of people are well-meaning and I believe the majority of human beings are good and empathetic.
“The others? I don’t want to judge them. I don’t know their stories or what they’ve been through. They must have been hurt by somebody. They’re just hurt human beings who need to lash out. Something has hurt them so much that all they can do all day is hurt others.”
Hating these people, she says, wouldn’t help her in any way. Indeed, it would probably make her life worse, creating more emotional pain. However, she is frank in saying that the abuse did make her angry at times.
“There have been some papers thrown on the floor. It’s not like I don’t react, I have a temper, I can explode. But in the long term, anger isn’t going to be good for me.”
Christine also suspects that perhaps her family’s wealth played a part in the abuse.
Although the family is rich, Christine’s son Suleman just wanted to be “a lad”, she says. That’s why he came to study business and human resources at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. Suleman wanted to get out of “his bubble”, she explains.
He didn’t want to hang around with upper-crust mates at a “posh” university. He fell in love with Glasgow, though Christine was less than impressed with his grotty student digs. “There was fungus,” she says. “It was a real dump.”
Despite being initially unsure of her son living away in Glasgow, and wanting him to study in Edinburgh, she soon came to love the city. Glasgow was quirky and cool and “had heart”, Suleman told her. She came to see that too – although she still struggles to understand a broad Glasgow accent.
“He absolutely loved Glasgow. He had a group of friends in Scotland he called ‘my lads’. He was just a regular teenager with his moodiness and his loveliness. He was a very affectionate son. He never felt ashamed when I’d come and hug him and kiss him.
“He endured my love and was very sweet about it. I asked him often: ‘Are you sure? I can control myself if you don’t want me to flood you.’ And he was like, ‘it’s fine, mum’. He had his moments, of course. A door would fly and the house would shake. It was just regular teenage ups and downs.”
Loss
THEIR “medium of communication was walking”, she explains. Suleman would stay up all night – like many teenagers – whereas his mum is an early riser. “I love chasing sunrises,” she says. So first thing in the morning, they’d go out walking together. It was their special time. “We’d catch up, he’d tell me what was going on in his life.”
It was those mother-and-son walks in the countryside which helped Christine find a way forward through her grief after her terrible loss. She wanted to do something just for her son after his death. In the media, she explains, her husband and son were “always put together, as if they had no individuality”.
“Grieving a partner is very different to grieving a child. The pain is different. The grieving process is different,” she explains. “It’s the same with your parents. I’d already lost both my parents. When you lose your parents, there’s a sense of the circle of life, that this is how it’s supposed to be. But losing a child? You’re not supposed to look into your child’s grave. It should be the other way around.”
Shahzada’s family had already “done a lot in his name” after he died. “I wanted to do something just for Suleman and me,” Christine explains. Not long before the Titan disaster, Suleman suggested that they walk to Glasgow together from their home in England as an adventure. So that’s what she did last summer – without her son.
The pair had planned to undertake the England-to Scotland-walk after their trip to the site of the Titanic. Suleman had even started training for the journey. “He never got the chance. We never got the chance,” Christine says. “Therefore, in the summer of 2025, to honour him, his life, his love and his passion, I set out to walk the length of the country.”
She called the 400-mile walk her “pathway of light”. “Suleman was my light. When he was born, he was an emergency C-section. I almost lost him at birth. He brought so much light into our lives. I think walking from the darkness into the light is very symbolic.”
The walk took six weeks. Her family supported her along the route. Christine’s brother and niece walked with her, and her sister drove. Other friends and family met with them along the way as they stopped at B&Bs and hotels overnight.
She walked 15 miles every day. “My whole body was in pain. I turned 50 last year. But then there’s a phase where the body gets used to it and the mental pain comes. But I wanted that. I was there to walk through my grief.”
On the day after her wedding anniversary, Christine was passing Morecambe and felt the need to be by the sea. “I feel close to them at the ocean because they’re part of the ocean,” she says. “I dip my toe in and feel they’re part of me. I don’t need a grave. I’m happy at the ocean. It’s very symbolic for me.”
Goodbye
SHE cried by the sea. “It was really cathartic. I really leaned into the grief and consciously connected with them. I wanted to feel pain and happiness.”
The next day, Christine and her brother had to turn inland as part of their route to Scotland. Her brother innocently told her to “say goodbye to the ocean”.
Christine adds: “That completely destroyed me. I had to sit down. It felt like I’d lost them all over again. It was just a flippant sentence, and my brother didn’t mean anything, but I could do nothing but cry.
“It was such a powerful moment as my brother and niece were there and gave me the space to just cry. They stood behind me and I knew they’d got me and I was safe. It was beautiful. That was a very powerful moment on the walk.”
Her act of “leaning into grief” was, Christine says, “absolutely brutal. But grief has a bad habit of wanting to be acknowledged. So either you do it consciously on your terms or it comes when you don’t want it – when you’re sitting on the bus or at a meeting – on its terms”.
The end point of her journey was Strathclyde University. Christine had told the university she was coming. “I thought we’d maybe just get some refreshments when we arrived.” Instead, the university top brass turned out to honour her and her son. There were speeches. Christine was given a medallion. “Suleman’s pals and professors were there. It was a massive welcome.”
The journey was an act of healing for Christine. “We can keep on moving, even if everything inside us wants to stop. Movement can guide us even through the darkest moments, and healing doesn’t arrive all at once, but gently, step by step.”
And the therapy centre which Christine is building for others who have suffered unimaginable loss? It’s going to be called Pathway of Light, named after the journey of recovery that her “beautiful boy” inspired her to undertake. The proceeds of Christine’s book will fund the centre.
Christine’s husband Shahzada was markedly different to her. “I’m a very rooted person, very connected to the Earth. I’m the oak, he’s an eagle. He’d fly and be free but always come back to land on my branches. He needed me to bring him back down to Earth again.”
Fittingly, one of Shahzada’s passions was birds. Like Christine, he was a nature lover. Although unlike Christine, who doesn’t mind roughing it in the great outdoors, Shahzada liked his creature comforts.
Tragedy
IN terms of the legal and regulatory aftermath of the Titan disaster, it’s not an issue Christine wants to talk about that much. What she wants is for legislation to be passed which ensures such a tragedy never happens again. But dwelling on the intricate ins and outs of the investigation drags her back to a time that’s too painful to bear.
“I made another choice,” she says. “I will not – I cannot – think of Oceangate too much. I just want it to never happen again, whatever it takes.”
As a family, the Dawoods discussed “getting after” everyone connected to the disaster. She realised doing so, however, would become her “whole life’s purpose”.
Such a battle could take decades “but the bigger thing is the emotional toll that it would take on us”. Her brother-in-law told her the family would fight tooth and nail, if that’s what she wanted. But he also warned her that this would become a lifelong mission which she would be “confronted with literally on a daily basis”.
Christine pauses and whispers something to herself, so softly it’s impossible to hear what she’s saying. Then she repeats the words louder and with more certainty. “I don’t want that,” she says.
She wants the law changed and better safety procedures, but she also wants to live for herself as well. Regulatory changes are already happening, she explains, thanks to Canada. She hopes that at some stage America will follow suit.
She has no wish to speak ill of Stockton Rush, the owner of OceanGate who died in the Titan disaster. “The US coastguard has a very good report coming out,” Christine says, “which explains the toxic culture very well. But he died with them so I want to leave it at that.”
It’s only now that Christine is beginning to emerge from the shadow of the disaster. She cannot allow herself to remain trapped there any longer. “I hid away a long time. I’m only coming out now.” She’s speaking literally, not metaphorically. After the disaster, daily life was just too overwhelming. “Everything was too loud, too bright.”
She’s vivacious, so hiding herself away must have been hard. “Yeah,” she says. “I love people. But grief and trauma have different effects on different people.
“I couldn’t meet people as my nervous system was completely overloaded. I couldn’t take the noise of crowds. The squeaking of a grocery cart would overload my system.
“You know a barrel that’s full of water? That was my nervous system. Every squeak was a drop that would make it overflow. I would end up in panic attacks. I just couldn’t handle it any more. I had to slowly work on that. I’m able to take normal noise now. But before I couldn’t, so I just didn’t go out.”
Cursed
CHRISTINE was never overwhelmed with rage, however. “I chose not to be. I had my angry moments but I will not give it power over me. It was an accident – a preventable accident, but an accident.”
Rage means a loss of control. “I chose to take my agency back, as I had zero control. I’d no control on the ship, I’d no control over the rescue, I’d no control over where my husband and son were, or what the media was saying. The one choice I had was over how I react. If I’d given in to anger that would have overpowered me and I would have lost everything. I refused to do that. I can be stubborn.”
However, she adds: “Survivors’ guilt, though – that’s very real.”
Her stubbornness meant she clung to hope during that desperate 96-hour search before the truth emerged. She believed the sub was “just stuck down there and we’d bring them up”.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet, known as Mr Titanic given his knowledge of the wreck, was one of the passengers. “He’d dived to the Titanic 30 times. I believed he’d bring them up.” Hamish Harding had been down to the Mariana Trench, the deepest ocean spot on Earth. “So he was experienced as well. We just thought the communications had failed.”
The rescue mission was joined by the Scottish oil ship Deep Energy, which travelled hundreds of miles to assist. Given Suleman lived in Glasgow, Christine took it as a good omen. “I was like, it’s a sign!
“The Scots are here. Now everything will be okay as the Scots are going to bring them back up because Scottish people are good people, right? That’s what they do, they help people.”
The crew of Deep Energy sent down two remote-operated vehicles – called ROVs – to look for the Titan. On both occasions, the ROVs lost contact. “I thought, what the hell, what is down there?” Christine says.
She imagined that some huge Kraken-type monster was “down there catching submarines”.
Christine ponders out loud if the area is “cursed, like the Bermuda Triangle”. The Titanic had, after all, claimed five new victims. Certainly, Christine believes there are places on Earth with “good energy”, so perhaps, she wonders, the site of the Titanic could be a place that “you should not cross”.
Eventually, the news came: the US coastguard said there had been a “catastrophic event”.
Christine hates the word “catastrophe” now. She hears it when people say they missed the bus or had a bad day at work. “That’s not a catastrophe. I know what a catastrophe is now.”
The only saving grace was that nobody suffered. The sub imploded and death was instantaneous. “If they’d died of suffocation, we’d be talking very differently now,” she adds.
Throughout it all, Christine kept her faith in God, though her belief did waiver at times. “It’s very difficult to understand why my child had to die before me,” she says.
While the cruelty of social media brought her low often, it was the expressions of love and support from people she had never met which gave her strength.
“We had prayers from all religions all around the world. It was just beautiful,” she says.
“Absolutely beautiful.”
